Stasi stripped gold from victims of Nazis

THE Stasi, the East German secret police, repeated one of the crimes of the Nazis when they stripped gold from the teeth of Jews found in a mass grave, their own files show.

The story of how the former East German regime apparently sought to profit from the discovery of 577 Jewish skeletons in 1971 has been uncovered by Andreas Weigelt, a historian. It is believed to be the first evidence of such action by the Stasi.

Mr Weigelt, who runs an exhibition at Lieberose concentration camp, south-east of Berlin, where the victims were held before their deaths, said yesterday: "I stumbled over a few pages that rather secretively documented how this gold had been collected. I was aghast."

The documents, discovered in the secret police's archives, disclose that the Stasi dug around in the grave, south of Berlin, looking for gold crowns and gold teeth among the skeletons.

Some documents suggest that the Stasi wanted the teeth and gold to help to identify the victims and explain how they died. This explanation has been ridiculed by experts, not least because the files make clear that more than two pounds of gold ended up in the Stasi's finance department.

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The remains in the grave were of some of a group of 1,200 Jews killed by drunken SS men and other Nazi guards between Feb 2 and Feb 4, 1945, as they set out on a march from Lieberose to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin.

"Some 1,600 were sent on the march," Mr Weigelt said, "and 1,200 of them were eliminated by drunken SS men, guards and commanders of the camp. The corpses were buried in a great hurry."

After the grave was discovered in the village of Staakow, near Lieberose, the East German authorities told residents that the bodies were those of anti-Nazi resistance fighters and not Jews.

But the Stasi documents show that the authorities knew that most of the dead were Jews.

The claim was typical of the propaganda issued by a regime that sought to portray East Germans in the Second World War as brave soldiers of resistance against the Nazi regime.